Supported Devices

Reference Circuits

Evaluation Boards

Description

This is a Linux industrial I/O (IIO) subsystem driver, targeting multi channel serial interface ADCs.
The industrial I/O subsystem provides a unified framework for drivers for many different types of converters and sensors using a number of different physical interfaces (i2c, spi, etc).
See IIO for more information.

Source Code

Status

Files

Example platform device initialization

For compile time configuration, it’s common Linux practice to keep board- and application-specific configuration out of the main driver file, instead putting it into the board support file.

For devices on custom boards, as typical of embedded and SoC-(system-on-chip) based hardware, Linux uses platform_data to point to board-specific structures describing devices and how they are connected to the SoC. This can include available ports, chip variants, preferred modes, default initialization, additional pin roles, and so on. This shrinks the board-support packages (BSPs) and minimizes board and application specific #ifdefs in drivers.

Declaring I2C devices

Unlike PCI or USB devices, I2C devices are not enumerated at the hardware level. Instead, the software must know which devices are connected on each I2C bus segment, and what address these devices are using. For this reason, the kernel code must instantiate I2C devices explicitly. There are different ways to achieve this, depending on the context and requirements. However the most common method is to declare the I2C devices by bus number.

This method is appropriate when the I2C bus is a system bus, as in many embedded systems, wherein each I2C bus has a number which is known in advance. It is thus possible to pre-declare the I2C devices that inhabit this bus. This is done with an array of struct i2c_board_info, which is registered by calling i2c_register_board_info().

So, to enable such a driver one need only edit the board support file by adding an appropriate entry to i2c_board_info.

Hardware configuration

Driver testing

Each and every IIO device, typically a hardware chip, has a device folder under /sys/bus/iio/devices/iio:deviceX.
Where X is the IIO index of the device. Under every of these directory folders reside a set of files, depending on the characteristics and features of the hardware device in question.
These files are consistently generalized and documented in the IIO ABI documentation. In order to determine which IIO deviceX corresponds to which hardware device, the user can read the name file /sys/bus/iio/devices/iio:deviceX/name. In case the sequence in which the iio device drivers are loaded/registered is constant, the numbering is constant and may be known in advance.

Trigger management

If deviceX supports triggered sampling, it’s a so called trigger consumer and there will be an additional folder /sys/bus/iio/device/iio:deviceX/trigger. In this folder there is a file called current_trigger, allowing controlling and viewing the current trigger source connected to deviceX. Available trigger sources can be identified by reading the name file /sys/bus/iio/devices/triggerY/name. The same trigger source can connect to multiple devices, so a single trigger may initialize data capture or reading from a number of sensors, converters, etc.

Trigger Consumers:
Currently triggers are only used for the filling of software ring
buffers and as such any device supporting INDIO_RING_TRIGGERED has the
consumer interface automatically created.

Description: Read name of triggerY

This specifies any shell prompt running on the target

root:/sys/bus/iio/devices/triggerY/> cat name
irqtrig56

Description: Make irqtrig56 (trigger using system IRQ56, likely a GPIOIRQ), to current trigger of deviceX

The Industrial I/O subsystem provides support for various ring buffer based data acquisition methods.
Apart from device specific hardware buffer support, the user can chose between two different software ring buffer implementations. One is the IIO lock free software ring, and the other is based on Linux kfifo.
Devices with buffer support feature an additional sub-folder in the /sys/bus/iio/devices/deviceX/ folder hierarchy. Called deviceX:bufferY, where Y defaults to 0, for devices with a single buffer.

Every buffer implementation features a set of files:

length
Get/set the number of sample sets that may be held by the buffer.

enable
Enables/disables the buffer. This file should be written last, after length and selection of scan elements.

scan_elements
The scan_elements directory contains interfaces for elements that will be captured for a single triggered sample set in the buffer.

in_voltageX_type / in_voltageX-voltageY_type / timestamp_type:
Description of the scan element data storage within the buffer
and therefore in the form in which it is read from user-space.
Form is [s|u]bits/storage-bits. s or u specifies if signed
(2's complement) or unsigned. bits is the number of bits of
data and storage-bits is the space (after padding) that it
occupies in the buffer. Note that some devices will have
additional information in the unused bits so to get a clean
value, the bits value must be used to mask the buffer output
value appropriately. The storage-bits value also specifies the
data alignment. So u12/16 will be a unsigned 12 bit integer
stored in a 16 bit location aligned to a 16 bit boundary.
For other storage combinations this attribute will be extended
appropriately.

in_voltageX_index / in_voltageX-voltageY_index / timestamp_index:
A single positive integer specifying the position of this
scan element in the buffer. Note these are not dependent on
what is enabled and may not be contiguous. Thus for user-space
to establish the full layout these must be used in conjunction
with all _en attributes to establish which channels are present,
and the relevant _type attributes to establish the data storage
format.

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